Almost like ‘being there’…

Солнце (Solntse—The Sun) 2005 Russia, in Japanese and English (110 minutes) directed by Alexander Sokurov, who also directed the photography.

This is an elegaically slow but fascinating portrait of the Japanese Emperor Hirohito (Issei Ogata) in the last days of the Second World War and his capitulation to the American Emperor MacArthur (Robert Dawson).

Hirohito is something like a bonsai tree: an odd little ordinary man who makes dilettantish stabs at poetry and marine biology and does strange things with his lips, obsessively and protectively pampered and pruned by ever-present servants, as though potted in an imposed self-absorption.

The imposition in this instance is the Shinto religious belief that the emperor is a god by virtue of his birth. He is revered and worshipped as a god, but his ‘godliness’ does not appear to confer any actual or earthly power, besides ceremonial reverence. Members of the Japanese government and military give the emperor deference, but mostly handle the mundane human details of ruling the country and Japanese overseas empire and running the war themselves.

In a sense, this Hirohito is something like Jerzy Kosinski’s gnomic Chance the gardener in Being There.

On the other hand, the film leaves us no doubt that American General-of-the-Army Douglas MacArthur is an emperor with god-like powers. Like Hirohito, MacArthur is shown mostly by himself in sumptuous settings, but it is clear that vast military, economic and political power put him there and back him up, and he has an ego to match.

One of the things that MacArthur saw as key to the pacification of occupied Japan was ending or at least removing any potential threat posed by the traditional state religion of emperor worship. He did this by convincing Hirohito to renounce his divine origin and nature in a public address broadcast to the nation.

This is a strange solution, in a sense, because the emperor’s divinity is a fact that attaches to the person, and not really within that person’s power to assume or reject—though maybe the new American emperor had—or thought he had—such power.    

In the final scene, the Emperor, no longer a god and happy to be reunited in peacetime with his Empress and their children, asks his chamberlain (Shiro Sano) about the sound technician who had taped his speech to the people renunciating his divinity. The chamberlain tells him that the technician committed hara-kiri.

‘Did you try to stop him?’ the Emperor wonders—‘No.’

Roll credits.

This is an odd and oddly effecting film. It is shot in the muted colors of film dream or memory that somewhat resembles color retouched Japanese photography of the period. It should come as no surprise that the director is also the director of photography.

This film is one of three intimate profiles Sokurov has made of historical figures. He also directed Moloch [Молох] (1999), a domestic portrait of Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun and several close advisors set in Berchtesgaden in 1942, and Taurus [Телец] (2001), recounting Vladimir Lenin’s last days.

Sokurov may be best known in the United States for his 90-minute feature film Russian Ark [Русский ковчег] (2002), an historical fantasia shot in a single continuous take in the former Winter Palace of the Hermitage, now the Hermitage Museum, in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA9RMgA3G6w

A fine comedy

Karbid und sauerampfer (Carbide and Sorrel) 1963 DEFA Filmstudios, East Germany (80 minutes) directed by Frank Beyer, screenplay by Hans Oliva.

A German Everyman uses his wits to accomplish a nearly impossible task in difficult circumstances in this comedy reminiscent of the classic British postwar Ealing Studios films.

Based on a true story and made less than a generation after the war’s end, this film looks back with parody and light nostalgia on the real hardships of a period that by the 1960s had been overcome but still was fresh in people’s memories.

Erwin Geschonneck and Marita Böhme in Frank Beyer's 1963 East German comedy Karbid und sauerampfer (Carbide and Sorrel)

In order to rebuild the Marcella Cigarette Factory in Dresden where he worked before Allied bombs destroyed it, Karl ‘Kalle’ Blücher (Erwin Geschonneck) must go to a factory in Wittenberge where his brother-in-law works to bring back carbide, an industrial carbon compound needed to weld the cigarette factory’s bomb-damaged drives so its machinery can run again.

Assuming that his relative will give him the carbide, this trip involves crossing several hundred kilometers of war-ravaged, mined and hungry Soviet-occupied Germany in the months after the war to transport a rationed industrial material. 

A coworker demonstrates to Kalle how easy it will be. He opens a map and ‘walks’ the roughly 350 kilometers from Dresden to Wittenberge with his index and middle finger. Kalle can walk or hitchhike, and it is lovely countryside, another tells him. And because Kalle is a vegetarian who eats things like sorrel, watercress, and mushrooms, he can live off the land as he makes his way there and back, a third helpfully chimes in. Food details throughout the film would have resonated with the contemporary home audience, such as contrasting a fat American corporal with skinny German refugees—and Soviet soldiers.

Thus Kalle sets out on his six-week adventure through the Soviet Zone of Occupation in Germany, in that short post-Nazi, ante-German Democratic Republic respite after the end of the war.

            His is a trek reminiscent of the Good Soldier Švejk’s ‘Budějovice Anabasis’ as an Austro-Hungarian private during the First World War, described tongue-in-cheek by the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek:

‘Marching forward all the time is what is called an anabasis: penetrating into unknown regions: being cut off by enemies who are waiting for the first convenient opportunity to wring your neck. If anyone has a good head on his shoulders, like Xenophon…he can work real wonders on a march.’ (The Good Soldier Švejk, Pt. II, Chap. 2, English translation by Cecil Parrott; Švejk, below, in a Josef Lada illustration from the text.)

In this movie, Kalle has a good head on his shoulders and works real wonders.

He whistles his Everyman theme as he walks to Wittenberge, a doughty little air that would not be out of place in an Ealing comedy. He passes civilian refugees and avoids Red Army columns which he watches wide-eyed from concealment each time they roll by with an energetic, stringy rendition of the Russian folk song Kalinka. A brassy Battle Hymn of the Republic announces Americans on the other side of the Elbe River.

Kalle’s brother-in-law gives him seven 50-kilogram barrels of carbide, but tells him that transporting them the 350-kilometers back to Dresden is his problem.

Kalle gets his first lift from Karla (Marita Böhme) who happened to pass by the factory in a horse drawn wagon. Karla lives within sight of the factory, but helps put Kalle in the right frame of mind for what is to come. His ‘anabasis’ involves transporting his barrels via several trucks, a cart, a baby carriage; a horse-drawn hearse and two boats; German truck drivers and Soviet military authorities, an opera singer and a Berlin orphan ‘going to America’, a fat American corporal driving a motorboat, black marketeers and rascally ex-Wehrmacht soldiers, German police, and a sexually ravenous widow—in roughly 30-kilometer stages.

Nearly everyone Kalle meets on the road is self-interested, either by nature or hard necessity.

They suspect that this man hauling much more of a rationed industrial compound than he can use personally must be involved in an illegal activity.

However, as in the Ealing comedies, the protagonist embodies the best qualities of the national character, and applies those qualities to better society in spite of itself. Here, Kalle subordinates his self-interest to the greater common good of rebuilding postwar Germany, even if that means just getting a cigarette factory running again. (Geschonneck spent most of the Nazi years incarcerated as a political prisoner in concentration camps.)

And like his spiritual brother-heroes in the Ealing comedies, the secret to Kalle’s success is that he remains wryly cheerful—and watchful—throughout.

Tangled up in green

Kisses 2008 Ireland/Sweden (78 minutes) written and directed by Lance Daly.

An eleven-year-old boy regularly beaten by his father and his next-door neighbor, an eight-year-old sexually abused by her uncle, flee their desolate suburban neighborhood to go to Dublin on Christmas Eve.

Kylie (Kelly O’Neill) throws a ladder up to the second floor window of the bathroom where Dylan (Shane Curry), who has just intervened in one of his parents’ fights, has locked himself in and has his angry father (Paul Roe) breaking through the door.

Dylan gets out the window in the nick of time and the ladder comes crashing down with him on it. The children are unhurt and make a clean getaway from their ‘kips,’ but where do they go?

On the other side of a field crossed with high power lines is a canal. Kylie jumps on a passing dredger before the captain (David Bendito) realizes this little girl can do so; soon he has both children on board, headed for Dublin with him. When Dylan tells the captain his name, the captain pulls out a harmonica and plays and sings Bob Dylan’s Shelter from the Storm—which fades to the original track. He tells Dylan that his ‘namesake’ is ‘a musical god.’

As the children bond with the captain, color begins to filter through what had been black and white. The captain lets the children off in full color Dublin, ostensibly to find Dylan’s older brother, Barry, who ran away from home to Dublin two years before also because their father beat him. Dylan thinks that Barry squats in a house on Gardiner Street.

But first Kylie, who resembles the little Drew Barrymore, uses money she found hidden at home that morning to buy them both jackets and ‘wheelie’ sneakers with lights and wheels in the heels, and they scamper happily dodging adults through a brightly colored mall, then up and down O’Connell Street and along quays on the Liffey River on their ‘wheelies’.

Along the way, they meet and spend time with an eccentric busker (José Jimenez) who plays Bob Dylan’s music. They zip off to Gardiner Street in central Dublin to knock on doors looking for Barry. People know of Barry, but no one knows where he is. When Dylan asks a woman outside the squat flat (Elizabeth Fuh) why she just kissed an older man, she sits down next to Dylan and tells him that the man is kind.

‘I can give nothing to him, only kisses. When you kiss, you give or take,’ she says, kissing Dylan on the cheek. ‘See. For you, I give you luck.’

Dylan and Kylie’s luck involves coming face to face with Bob Dylan himself—an Australian impersonator (Adrian Kennedy) taking a smoke break from his show—and a narrow escape from the Sackman—a fairy tale bogeyman who in the flesh turns out to be a child molester and his accomplice. The children find a close trusting bond in helping each other in the course of their escapades.

MP would have loved this picture when we were the age of its protagonists and imagines that most kids and adults also should enjoy it. The story is well made and well written for these two appealing child actors, although their salty tongues—they only repeat what they hear adults and their older siblings and peers say—and some of the things to which they are exposed are several cries beyond the Disney lot. 

The dark side of the law

The Interview 1998 Australia (103 minutes) directed and cowritten by Craig Monahan.

This is a taut crime drama and a marvelously complex character study in a deceptively simple setting.

The story centers on a series of interviews between a veteran detective, his rookie partner, and a suspected car thief, which take place one morning in a generic Australian state police interview room. 

Detective Sergeant John Steele (Tony Martin) is a seasoned interrogator whose calm, deliberate watchfulness provides the bite in contrast to the excessively combative, physical bark of his partner, Detective Senior Constable Wayne Prior (Aaron Jeffery).

Eddie Rodney Fleming (Hugo Weaving) is the quarry: a hapless, unemployed, middle-aged man seized from his apartment early one morning, who eventually finds out he is accused of having stolen a car.

The evidence against Fleming is circumstantial, thin at best.

A man fitting Fleming’s description was seen with the owner of the stolen car, a man named Beecroft, in a rural area out of town at the time the car purportedly was stolen. Steele shows Fleming an ownership title that indicates that Beecroft ‘transferred’ the car to a Paul Williams. Both Beecroft and Williams have disappeared; both signatures on the title allegedly are forged—and match Fleming’s handwriting.

Barry Walls (Michael Caton), a veteran newspaper police beat reporter, gets wind that something is up when department head Detective Inspector Jackson (Paul Sonkkila) clears him to speak with Steele, ostensibly about the Fleming case.

Walls has been looking into a pattern of similar disappearances: unsolved missing persons cases involving ordinary, everyday middle-aged city dwellers. The Beecroft case fits the pattern.

Steele does not like reporters. He does not like Walls. Department politics make him leery of his boss and colleagues, including his beefy, gung-ho partner, whom he angrily cautions: ‘There are too many people around here with their own agendas.’ But Steele may have a use for Walls before this tale is over.

Steele’s higher-ups assigned him to the case because he has a record for getting results. His effectiveness comes with a reputation for pushing hard in interrogations. Four suspects have filed official complaints against him in the last three years, all dismissed.

It is clear that Steele is audiotaping his interviews with the suspect for the record and an ‘objective’ narrator shows us Steele, Prior and Fleming sitting around a table in the interview room. But a camera hidden in the console below the audio tape deck is trained on the three men at the table. The ‘objective’ narrator who shows us the three men in the room also shows us another person watching what this hidden camera is seeing from this vantage point on a television monitor in another room in the building—particularly before and after Steele switches the audiotape on.  

Chiaroscuro lighting of a range of brown tones and a moody original score composed and performed by David Hirschfelder lend to the dark atmosphere of the piece.

Fleming eventually owns that he is a serial killer. When pressed for a motive after he spins a yarn about killing Beecroft, Fleming smiles at his two interrogators and memorably tells them with a smile, ‘It was his time to grin at the lid’—the coffin lid.

However, Fleming’s confession becomes incidental to other forces at work, and each of this cast of actors does a first rate job in bringing off this all-too-realistic story.

Who could imagine police department officials using evidence of a purported abuse of a suspect’s constitutional rights to play politics against one of their own?

The only people who might not be surprised at how this story shakes out are police investigators, lawyers who defend and prosecute criminals, and court and police beat reporters.

The final shot is reminiscent of the end of The Usual Suspects (1995), with Fleming, like Roger ‘Verbal’ Kint, the character played by Kevin Spacey, released from police custody and moving down the street away from the police station looking increasingly satisfied with himself. The main difference is that here two shadow teams of four policemen are tailing Fleming.

Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTBAe6885us

Head games and eye candy

The Holy Mountain 1973 Mexico (113 minutes) created, written and directed by Alexandro Jodorowsky.

In The Holy Mountain, which followed his 1970 cult ‘midnight feature’ hit El Topo, director Alexandro Jodorowsky baked the cinematic High Theater of Religion at street theater temperature and basted it with New Age esotericism.

The result makes for a tantalizing dish, whether one finds it to be a rich confection of symbols and images geared toward self-discovery, or a psychedelic circus of head games and eye candy.

In El Topo (The Mole), a Zen master gunslinger called The Mole (Jodorowsky) burrows deep into a mountain to free an ‘underclass’ of deformed people imprisoned inside whom in the end he cannot save.

In The Holy Mountain, The Alchemist (Jodorowsky) leads a Christ-like figure called The Thief (Horacio Salinas) and a group of seven Companions to scale a mountain to seize the secret of immortality from The Nine Immortal Men who live on top.

What The Devil to make of all this, though?

As in El Topo, start with the High Theater of Religion, particularly of the flavor Roman Catholic. Picture an august array of its principal figures and symbols motoring majestically through Mexico at a high rate of speed in an ornate vehicle we’ll call ‘Seeing Is Believing.’

Hurtling just as quickly toward this Holy Assemblage from the opposite direction is the Tarot’s Chariot, here a vehicle reminiscent of Ken Kesey’s Magic Bus. The bus has the Tarot’s 21 major arcana on board, with the no ‘count Fool its Neal Cassady behind the wheel and a big hamper of alchemy instruments strapped to the roof. We’ll call this bus ‘What You See Is What You Get.’

A squeal of wheels. A loud crash. The two decks of icons shuffled in a riot of bold color under the bright Mexican sun. And from the wreckage crawls a lone gone cat, as though from a Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem: ‘Christ climbed down/from His bare Tree/this year…’*

The Holy Mountain is a potpourri of inventive pop renderings of images from and references to the world’s major religions and mystic practices, from alchemy and astrology to yoga and Zen Buddhism, inlaid with an Aquarian counterculture criticism of Western capitalism and materialism.

One conceivably could dig out of this rich vocabulary of images a variety of ingenious interpretations, though one of Jodorowsky’s points seems to be along the lines of George Harrison’s ‘Beware of Maia!’ in his 1970 album All Things Must Pass—that is, do not be deceived by the illusory nature of the material world.

Incidentally, Harrison reportedly balked at a role in the film at the prospect of having to appear naked. (John Lennon likewise declined a part because he did not want to spend three months away from Yoko Ono in Mexico.)

Nevertheless, illusory images are all we have to go on. Rather than roll one’s eyes at the pop New Age symbols or take offense at the use of religious images, sit back and enjoy the spectacle. Bear in mind that Jodorowsky is a showman and his film is an act of entertainment—much as Harrison was a musician speaking for himself.

The film’s strong points are Jodorowsky's fertile and energetically inventive mind, and that he knows how to frame a shot and to tell a story in pictures. He seems to do this with an awed reverence for the process and the story that draws a viewer in and inspires the suspension of disbelief, probably the keys to a master street performer’s skill and charm.

The Holy Mountain opens with The Alchemist, clad from head to toe in black with a high-crowned, wide brimmed black hat, ritually cleaning a matched pair of lovely naked young blonde women who appear only in this opening scene. 

Next, The Thief, a young derelict with a full beard, dead drunk in a muddy village lane, is revived by The Crippled Man (Basilio González), a man with stumps for arms and legs, and transported to and placed upon a cross by a ‘Lord of the Flies’ band of naked boys.

This may sound like a gratuitous amount of nudity, but it is ‘equal opportunity’ nudity and it fits into the fabric of the narrative. The images are not prurient, simply the costumes in which certain characters appear in their given scenes.

Awakened when the boys start throwing rocks at him, The Thief climbs down from the cross and chases them away, setting into motion his journey, accompanied by The Crippled Man, to a Latin American town filled—among many, many other things—with bright, elaborate and abundant images from Roman Catholicism, repressive soldiers killing young people, rows of local women ironing bloody clothing, and clueless middle aged Yankee tourists in sombreros. 

After witnessing a ‘reenactment’ of the Conquest of Mexico performed by a ‘circus’ of toads in tiny Spanish conquistador armor and brown monastic robes against horned toad ‘natives’ caped and cowled in feathery ceremonial Aztec finery, The Thief ascends a high tower where he encounters The Alchemist, now dressed in white.

The Alchemist’s attendant, The Written Woman (Ramona Saunders), a statuesque Negress with long steel fingernails, marked with Hebrew letters and mystical tattoos, removes a squid in blue blood from a boil in The Thief’s neck. The Alchemist turns The Thief’s excrement to gold. The two begin their quest to The Holy Mountain.

The Alchemist completes his team with seven materially successful ‘seekers’ with sci-fi names and the attributes of planets, who would appear to embody Western cultural weaknesses similar to the seven deadly vices. During the quest, each must purify himself by overcoming his personal vice.

Legend has it that Nine Immortal Men live on top of The Holy Mountain. The Companions travel by sea to Lotus Island where The Holy Mountain is located, intending to scale the mountain and rob its nine incumbents of the secret of their immortality. 

And like a blow from a Zen master’s staff, the story ends with a twist.

Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHiA3w6Y3KA

Link to MP's El Topo review: http://moompitchers.blogspot.com/2011/04/kaleidoscopic-cult-western-all-about.html

*From Christ Climbed Down, a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in A Coney Island of the Mind, A New Directions Paperback No. 74; New York, 1958.

Sam Spade with a handbag?

Satan Met a Lady 1936 Warner Brothers (74 minutes) directed by William Dieterle, screenplay by Brown Holmes.

Women rule in this screwball comedy take on The Maltese Falcon that stands the story on its head and shakes mayhem and malarkey from everyone’s pockets.

Warren William, a character actor who played bad guys in period films, got time off for bad behavior to play Ted Shane, a louche, mustachioed Sam Spade stand-in who joyfully patronizes women and carries a tooled leather handbag for his pipes and smoking equipment—an ideal foil for practically any Bette Davis role.

‘Do you mind very much, Mr. Shane, taking off your hat to a lady with a gun?’ Davis’ starchy Valerie Purvis (Miss Wonderly/Brigid O’Shaughnessy in the book and other films) asks Shane one of several times that she gets the drop on him.

The movie opens with Shane escorted by law enforcement officials to a departing train, kicked out of an unnamed California town as an ‘undesirable’ and on his way to another called San Morego.

Calling himself Nash on the train, Shane meets a British grande dame in the dining car who calls herself Mrs. R. Manchester Arden (the British character actress Alison Skipworth). Davis’ Purvis, hiding behind tinted cheaters, is sitting close enough to eavesdrop.

Mrs. Arden turns out to be the notorious international criminal Madame Barabbas, a stand-in for Hammett’s Casper Gutman, later played memorably by Sydney Greenstreet in the John Huston classic. Rather than an enameled gold falcon, Madame Barabbas is on the hunt for the priceless, jewel-filled ‘Horn of Roland.’

So is Valerie Purvis. So is the clumsy, clubbable Brit Anthony Travers (Arthur Treacher) whom the fey Joel Cairo becomes in this version. Treacher was a character actor known for his British butler roles who, among others, most notably played P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves in films. He may be best known now for the food franchise that bears his name: Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips.

And on the sidelines is Shane’s secretary, Miss Murgatroyd (Marie Wilson), the ditsy blonde Shane pets and teases—though someone is keeping the office running, and it certainly is not the philandering Shane—another character actress enjoying the ride.

Screenwriter Brown Holmes, also credited in part for the first adaptation of The Maltese Falcon, remains remarkably faithful to the dialog, but Hammett’s plot lines turn into punchlines as these worthies romp round and round each other after the horn in this light, quick-moving studio comedy.

As police spirit Purvis away from the train on which she had thought she was making her escape with Shane, she tells Shane that he will always remember her ‘‘cause now you found a woman can be as smart as you. Someday you’ll find one who’ll be smarter. She’ll marry you!’

Guess who falls off the train into Shane’s arms?

MP came across this film in a two-DVD collection issued by Warner Brothers with John Huston’s 1941 The Maltese Falcon, its 1931 predecessor of the same title, and several period trailers, shorts and cartoons.

Dangerous female

The Maltese Falcon (aka Dangerous Female) 1931 Warner Brothers (80 minutes) directed by Roy Del Ruth, screenplay by Maude Fulton and Brown Holmes.

Every old movie buff knows the story of the black bird: a canny private eye matches wits with a fat man, a fey man and a femme fatale vying for a fabled falcon.  

But two years after Dashiell Hammett’s pulp detective masterpiece The Maltese Falcon first came out and ten years before John Huston’s 1941 iconic film classic—and before the Hayes Office started enforcing censorship guidelines on sexual and moral content—Warner Brothers released its first version of the story.

The 1931 film opens with an orchestral version of a nineties bandstand piece, the credits against the background of the cover of the novel. The camera flies in to San Francisco’s Embarcadero centered on the Ferry Building, then looks back steadily at the distant Ferry Building a good way down Market Street and pans 45 degrees to the left, probably at about Leavenworth Street. This is a crime drama set in San Francisco.

It turns out to be a pretty good detective movie.

It sticks close to the original story, as Huston did; most of the dialog in both movies comes straight from Hammett’s book. 

Ricardo Cortez, an Austrian expatriate who changed his name and styled his look on the classic Latin lover popular at the time, plays a ‘bad boy’ Sam Spade. We see him first in silhouette on the opaque glass of his office door making out with a woman visitor.

The door opens, the woman steps neatly around the jamb adjusting her nylons on well-turned calves, then sashays away, leaving us a smiling Sam Spade—less the businesslike and sardonic Humphrey Bogart than an earlier, lighter shade of the mocking Sean Connery as a young James Bond.

And like Miss Moneypenny, Spade’s secretary, the practical Effie Perine (Una Merkel), has seen and heard it all before. She ushers in a ‘looker,’ Ruth Wonderly (Bebe Daniels)—who later does not become Brigid O’Shaughnessy as in the novel and with Huston’s Mary Astor—to get the story rolling.

There is more tension between Spade and his partner Miles Archer (Walter Long) over Spade’s affair with his wife, Iva Archer (Thelma Todd) in this movie than in the later version. When Archer is murdered, the affair makes Spade a prime suspect.

At this point, there is an interesting detail not in the book or the Huston movie which, as in the opening shots, nods to the role the city of San Francisco plays in the book.

Archer was shot at the corner of Stockton and Bush Streets, which is on the periphery of Chinatown; we see a ‘chop suey’ joint and hear what sounds faintly like Chinese music in the background of the crime scene. Walking away from the crime scene, Spade passes a Chinese man (uncredited) on the street who makes a comment to him in Chinese. Spade listens, nodding, and briefly responds in Chinese. There is no further use or mention of Spade’s knowledge of Chinese.

At the end of the movie, this man is identified in a newspaper story as ‘Lee Fu Gow, Chinese merchant,’ who turns out to have been an eyewitness to Archer’s murder. Thus it turns out that the information he conveyed to Spade at the crime scene informed the streetwise detective’s subsequent dealings with the people after the black bird.

Miss Wonderly brings Dr. Joel Cairo (Otto Matieson) hot on her heels, with Caspar Gutman, played with brio by the Irish stage character actor Dudley Digges, and his ‘gunzel’ Wilmer Cook (Dwight Frye) not far behind. Matieson, Diggs and Frye are not Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and Elisha Cook Jr., but they are true to the characters in the book and work well as an ensemble in this piece.

Like many of its contemporaries, the film disappeared when the so-called Hayes Office of the Motion Picture Association started to enforce its censorship code in 1934. Warner Brothers changed the title from The Maltese Falcon to Dangerous Female to distinguish it from the Huston classic when it reissued the film for television years later.

But the film’s sins are modest for viewers now. Attractive women appear in gauzily coutured housedresses and negligees which tease more than they reveal. There are public displays of affection between unmarried couples. The dialogue is more sexually suggestive and subjects like adultery are discussed openly. And the men do a lot of open drinking, which was against the law during Prohibition (1919-1933).

The earlier film puts more emphasis on Spade’s success with women than the later, and less on the homosexual undertone in the book and the later film version, which pits Spade against the ‘lavender-scented’ Cairo, a sexually ambiguous Wonderly, Gutman and the young man he has travelled with around the world in pursuit of the falcon.

The Maltese Falcon of 1931 is satisfying to watch because the actors work so well together that the story rolls right through from start to finish.

            Who can blame anyone involved in the earlier project that first-time director John Huston would come along ten years later with a cast of studio contract players and stage actors and make a film legend?

Golden summer

L'Heure d'été (Summer Hours) 2008 Musée d’Orsay France (102 minutes) directed and written by Olivier Assayas.

The words ‘summer hours’ would not be out of place on a sign in a holiday resort, but as a film title it says nothing about this interesting story and does nothing to connect its characters.

The French title, L'Heure d'été, translates roughly as ‘the summer moment’ or ‘a slice of summer’: it is a ‘slice of summer,’ or flavors of that slice, which provides the sentimental attachment that the main characters have to a rustic, art-filled country house an hour from Paris.

Three siblings, Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), Frédéric (Charles Berling) and Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) Marly, spent their summer holidays at the house as children and enjoy bringing their own families to visit in the summer, particularly Frédéric, the eldest.

Their mother, Hélène Berthier (Edith Scob), a widow, lives in the house once owned by her uncle and the love of her life, a fictional famous painter Paul Berthier. It is filled with paintings and art objects that Paul collected, as well as Hélène’s memories of the sunniest moments of her life.

The film opens with a ‘slice of summer’: Hélène’s children and grandchildren visit her to celebrate her 75th birthday on a summer afternoon. Frédéric’s daughter, Sylvie (Alice de Lencquesaing) and son, Pierre (Emile Berling), lead the smaller children and several dogs down paths through a small garden to play in an orchard behind the house. Afterward, a happy, prosperous family sits down to lunch on the patio.

Hélène has maintained the house in homage to her uncle since his death in 1972, kept his housekeeper, Éloise (Isabelle Sadoyan), and moved there since her husband’s death. But she feels that when she will die, most of the history and secrets that make it special will die with her and it will be time to sell the house and its contents to benefit her children and their families. It will be time for the family to move on.

She tries to bring up the topic alone with Frédéric after lunch. She takes him aside to point out sentimental items she wants him to have, as well as several valuable pieces of furniture, and she shows him an inventory she has prepared.

Frédéric makes clear that he has no interest discussing her death. He cherishes the safety, security and warm feeling the house gives and guarantees Hélène that they will keep it and its contents just as they always were, maintained by Éloise to pass on to their own children and children’s children.

But as his mother knew, this turns out to be an unexamined sentiment on Frédéric’s part when these issues must be resolved after Hélène dies nine months later.

‘It’s their childhoods they love,’ she had tried to tell Frédéric. ‘When they’re adults they’ll have better things to do than deal with bric-a-brac from another time.’

Frédéric is an academic economist who lives in Paris with his wife, Lisa (Dominique Reymond), who also works, and their two teenage children Sylvie and Pierre.

Adrienne, an industrial designer who lives and works in New York, has pleasant childhood memories but spends little time in France. After she marries her American boy friend James (Kyle Eastwood), she expects to spend vacation time in his native Colorado.

Jérémie is an entrepreneur based in the Far East, who just signed a five-year deal to relocate to Beijing with his wife, Angela (Valérie Bonneton), and their three young children.

The family dynamic of how the three siblings and their spouses work out what to do with their mother’s house and the artwork and these actors’ outstanding ensemble performances gives the story a range, depth and color that draw a viewer in and make it compelling. Olivier Assayas’ eye enhances the ensemble work because he tends to include in his shots those who have just spoken or who speak little, but participate every bit as much with facial expressions and body language, such as the brothers’ spouses. 

Moments aside are nuanced similarly, as we see in a story about a vase. One of a pair of valuable Antonin Daum vases disappeared many years before; Hélène always said that Éloise the housekeeper broke it and just refused to admit it. Éloise averred that she never liked the vase, but did not know what happened to it and did not break it. She always preferred a homely glass vase she kept under the sink in the scullery.

When art experts and appraisers come through the house after Hélène’s death, Frédéric tells Éloise to take anything she would like of Hélène’s to remember her by—‘It’s the least we can do.’

‘There’s a vase with big green bubbles. I can keep flowers in it and think of her,’ Éloise tells Frédéric. She takes the smaller and homelier mate of the vase she usually used, carefully wrapping it to take home with her.

Frédéric smiles. An appraiser, dismissive of the Daum vase, earlier set these two vases aside as rare, museum-quality pieces made by Félix Bracquemond, circa 1880.

On her way home, Éloise showed the vase to her nephew (Christian Lucas): ‘He said to choose anything. I couldn’t take advantage. I took something ordinary. What would I do with something valuable?’

Mais ou sont les neiges—or in this instance, slices of summer—d’antan? (with apologies to François Villon). Hélène’s yesteryear and the siblings’ golden childhoods are memories. But Sylvie’s summertime runs through this tapestry like a bright-colored thread.

Alice de Lencquesaing’s Sylvie does not say much, but Assayas’ camera likes her and tells the viewer to pay attention to her. She is a young actor from a French acting family who seems to know what she is doing, and she has a screen presence. (She plays a similar mature teen sibling in Mia Hansen-Løve’s 2009 film Le père de mes enfants, in which the père of the title is her actual father, the actor Louis-Do de Lencquesaing.)

Sylvie and the children run down the garden path at the beginning of the film. At the end of the film, throwing a party at the house for her friends before a new owner takes it over, Sylvie shows a boyfriend where her grandmother stood picking cherries when her great uncle painted a picture of Hélène as a girl. It will be gone soon, she says wistfully; then they climb a wall and make their way back across a meadow to their friends and the summer party.

Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikERoS8Tvss